Highs And Lows Of Phones 4u
Updated: 11:58am UK, Monday 15 September 2014
Phones 4u's website was offline on Monday with a simple message: "Thank you for your custom. The heartbroken Phones 4u Team".
The company's collapse - a decision largely outside its own hands - contrasts sharply with its birth.
Phones 4u evolved from a company founded in 1987 by two brothers who were looking to get a slice of an exciting new market, by selling a small number of analogue Motorola handsets which looked more like plastic bricks than the slim-line devices of the modern digital age.
John and Brian Caudwell's business, Midlands Mobile Phones, soon expanded to become a wholesale distributor and led to the fomation of the wider Caudwell Group.
Its high street retail arm was named Phones 4u, which was selling 26 phones a minute, employing 10,000 people and generating sales of more than £2.25bn at its height in 2006.
On September 26, 2006, the Caudwell Group was sold for £1.47bn to private equity firms Providence Equity Partners and Doughty Hanson.
The new owners bought online retailer Dialaphone in 2008 in a deal worth an estimated £9m to complement its high street offering.
Two years later, Phones 4u partnered electrical chain Dixons to place concessions inside Currys and PC World stores.
The group was acquired by the private equity group BC Partners in March 2011 in a deal estimated at £700m.
The price was said to reflect the changing nature of mobile phone sales which were largely dominated by the networks that had stepped up their own high street presence.
It was confirmed on September 14 that Phones 4u was to be placed in administration.
The move followed the decisions by Vodafone and EE to not renew their contracts with the company.
The other mobile networks already stopped trading through Phones 4u, with Three leaving in 2012 and O2 earlier in 2014.
Phones 4u said it remained a profitable business, with turnover of more than £1bn, underlying earnings of £105m in 2013 and significant cash in the bank.
At the time it ceased trading, it had 550 stores, employing 5,596 people.
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